


Lim(b)ned

by ZiGraves



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, multiple limbs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-13
Updated: 2013-09-13
Packaged: 2017-12-26 11:27:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/965411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZiGraves/pseuds/ZiGraves
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is a fine line between symbiote and parasite, and between function and addiction. It is very important to remember exactly where this line is.</p>
<p>Also you should probably not try out local body modification fads in Night Vale. Just saying.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lim(b)ned

A year into his time at Night Vale had settled Carlos into casual disregard and acceptance for most of the town’s particular quirks.

Wednesdays may be cancelled, and that was normal. He learned to work around it, and continued on with his research, often by adding two additional working hours to the rest of the week to catch up all eight, or by checking against an atomic clock to find if time stretched around the Wednesday to provide additional research hours without risking sleep loss.

Children might be kidnapped by demons or pandimensional beings and that was… well, that was still horrific and terrible, of course, but it was the sort that just faded into background noise when even the children’s own parents didn’t mourn. He’d spent months in a desperate haze of horror, trying to find anyone with a reaction he might recognise as normal, but in the end he’d succumbed to the same sad agreement as everyone else. It was very tragic, but there were more children.

When he saw the advertisement for temporary limbs, then, after a year in Night Vale his only thoughts were “Oh. That might be useful in the lab”, followed by a mildly guilty “though I should test it for negative side effects first.”. One could choose from a catalogue of extra limbs, many of which were not remotely human, but for the purposes of the experiment he kept his blood tests and DNA sampling to recipients of traditionally human limbs. There was not even a slight hormonal imbalance to note. Blood sugar unaffected. Musculature returned to its original shape within hours of removal, and the ligature scarring would fade as quickly.

It only started as a private, practical thing. A removeable arm, only really used from time to time at home or late in the lab when everyone else had gone home to leave him without an assistant in his nocturnal research.

One wasn’t quite enough, though.

A second was needed for finesse and focus when handling delicate specimens, and certainly controlling four upper body limbs was rather more taxing than controlling just two, but that was fine as long as he got enough sleep and remembered to have an extra protein bar for energy at some point during proceedings. That was good, too, being able to eat one-handed and still have two or three hands free to keep working.

He did notice, in a half-comatose daze late at night, finally back home and under a scalding shower before bed, that the spare arms tended to wander when he wasn’t paying them any attention. A little harder to really control at peak exhaustion, but they were still just a plug and play system - easy to remove.

On weekends, when he was adequately rested or sufficiently caffeinated and would have the lab to himself for two solid days, he sometimes made use of a third bolt-on arm. It was great for reaching things from high shelves, for having all of his right hands simultaneously writing notes when something happened beneath the microscope that was far too involved and strange to be described at the speed of just one hand’s typing. He could fill a whiteboard with physics notations in minutes. He only really used them for things like that anyway, he’d tell himself. He didn’t just keep the arms around, permanently attached on weekends, _just in case_ they were useful in some random little tasks, no, he wore the spares for proper and sensible reasons of time and resource maximisation. But he didn’t detach them as quickly as he used to, when the day and night’s work was done. The muscular distortions were lingering longer and longer after use, the ligature marks seeming etched into his skin and often still waiting even after a full night’s sleep.

It was okay. No one would see. The hands didn’t wander as long as he ate enough, drank enough coffee. It was _fine_.

The laboratory’s interns commented that he looked a bit odd, and was he okay? He seemed tired but his eyes had a slightly feverish look, had he been having trouble sleeping? And he’d laugh and dismiss their fears as just a little bit of overwork, and he found that he looked forward to when they left. He looked forward to having the place empty, that little extra bit of time alone to experiment more with the boundaries of this… useful enchantment.

Sometimes they didn’t seem quite under his control. The touch of the spare hands on the occasions they brushed past his body was the touch of a stranger, and he couldn’t always quite feel what the hands felt, but it wasn’t a problem. They did what they were needed for and they were so useful that a mild loss of sensation wasn’t a good reason to stop using them.

And sometimes he’d leave them on, even after he finished every last little thing, just drift off to sleep or go for a shower with the grafts still in place, and he knew it wasn’t wise because he knew that his control would be slack at times like that, but it wasn’t like they were dangerous, and… well… when they wandered as his attention relaxed, it hadn’t really been a problem. He suspected they followed his subconscious commands when his conscious mind wasn’t attentive enough.

There wasn’t any malice in their independent movement, quite the opposite. Hands would massage his shoulders, stroke his hips, gently explore him, arouse him, tease him… and yes, sometimes, the grafts would make him come and in that momentary total loss of control they’d just continue to explore and toy with him and he’d be a bit uncertain that he really still owned them, but they were still _his_ limbs, and they were still removable any time he wanted. They surely couldn’t do any harm.

Sometimes he wouldn’t take them off for days at a time, now, and he’d wander the flat compiling research results that didn’t need him in the lab. He covered the mirrors. With his many arms the mirror showed a dreadful entity like some monstrous spider clinging to him, and they roamed. Roamed and roamed, any time he didn’t have his mind on all of them at once, and how could he with four of the things besides his original set? They’d pluck at clothing, pick up items, markers, scrawl half-remembered mathematical symbols on surfaces within reach, leave bits and pieces of garbled, gibberish physics littering the walls and table and floors and his clothing and his skin and he just couldn’t quite bring himself to remove them and discard them, he was too used to them, they were part of him even if he couldn’t quite feel them any more and even if they were a little slow responding to commands and even if they wandered more than they should.

He woke to their touch, now, and slept better when they stroked his hair, and he’d become sort of reclusive and sometimes someone would ask after him and he’d just sort of brush them off even if he didn’t mean to because there was always some other bit of antisocial work to be done and always something he needed the arms for even if he had somehow survived without them before. And day by day they seemed to be getting a touch more familiar, a touch more wilful. A touch more feral.

He woke to their touch, and it wasn’t the right touch. The hands were cold on his skin and they pressed callously against him, and when he reached for the nearest to disconnect it they grabbed his wrists. They weren’t responding. They weren’t _responding_. They were moving on their own and they weren’t responding. This wasn’t meandering subconscious fidgeting, this was malice, an aggressive takeover and _why weren’t they responding_? Hands grasped his wrists, ran over old scars, removed his glasses, tangled in his hair, touched his throat, held him in a vicious, inhuman grip and everywhere they were tightening.

Panic set in and he scrabbled to free himself, to get them off his body, rip off the malignant additions. They did not loosen, and they pushed back when he tried to bend and curl enough to grab a stray with his feet to yank it free. His face was mashed against the floor and the arms were malevolent. Parasitic. He bit his tongue, a desperate last resort to give back a bit of control with pain of his own choosing, to fight down the adrenalin with focus as they tightened and shit he was blacking out and he’d only managed to remove two and the others weren’t gone and didn’t seem to be going

He woke up some hours later, with only his original limbs on his body and carpet-weave printed on his face.

Something large and manylimbed _twitched_ beneath his coffee table.

Carlos backed up against the wall and called Cecil to ask about the local pound’s animal pickup service.

**Author's Note:**

> Another remix from an old 2010 work, heavily tidied up and modified for additional horror.


End file.
